An ongoing challenge for information technology (IT) departments is effectively backing up and protecting the vast amounts of data stored throughout the enterprise. The increase in electronic documents and other files, along with regulations and retention rules for data backup, has only led to a higher demand for performance efficiency in data protection and archival tools. It is estimated that 60% to 70% of the effort associated with storage management is related to backup and recovery.
While there are a growing variety of systems and services that provide efficient file system backups over the Internet, the traditional tape-based (and virtual tape) backup is still preferred in many enterprise environments, particularly for long-term data backup and data archival. Consequently, many organizations have significant amounts of backup data stored on tape (or virtual tapes), and those organizations are interested in improving performance of their tape-based data protection solutions.